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This is a full review of The Bridge: Series 4, Episode 5. Catch up with all the reviews here. Don’t read on unless you’re completely up-to-date on the BBC2 schedule!

Links! Links everywhere! Finally it’s all starting to come together!

After last week’s wibble my faith in The Bridge is restored. It looks like we’re over the hump and the jumbled spaghetti that this case has become is finally beginning make some kind of sense. Professionally Saga and Henrik are on fire when personally they’re at rock bottom.

The Case

Desperate Dan gets his comeuppance, shot by his own son. Did Frank contrive to make that happen, or was it really an accident? Frank takes advantage and uses it for his own gain – more leverage with poor troubled Christoffer, dividing him from his Mum by keeping secrets (not for very long though – don’t tell Chris anything you want kept private) and using his guilt against him. Far from having the boy’s best interest at heart Frank wants Chris to disappear and is now busy manipulating Sofie. He’s controlling in a way exactly like Dan, it’s just he’s playing 10 moves ahead and his ultimate goal is still a mystery to us. Dan’s death means the police finally pay the weird village a visit. Saga’s philosophy smackdown on Harriet is brutal but it’s clear she’s right – utopia in any form won’t work and the rot has already set in in this community.

“Nowhere else works like the cities”. This is the first line of BBC1’s new drama based on the 2009 ‘weird fiction’ novel by British author China Miéville, an exotically named man actually born in Norwich. His book has been adapted for TV by screen writer Tony Grisoni.

The cities in the title are Besźel, which looks like the Eastern Bloc of 30 plus years ago mixed with cafes and people from 1970s Istanbul and Ul Qoma which is glimpsed only briefly in the first episode. These streets look brighter, cleaner, and more advanced. The colour pallets are quite different in each city; dingy yellows for Besźel and clean blues for Ul Qoma. Like the inhabitants, the viewer always knows where they’re looking.

The two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but the inhabitants wilfully ‘unsee’ the areas they’re not allowed to view. Early on Commissar Gadlem (Ron Cook) gets out his overhead projector, and lays two acetate maps on top of each other. That’s a good way to get your head around it.

The Norwegian crime drama Eyewitness is a tricksy little fiend before we even start. I’ve been looking forward to this for literally months. Walter Iuzzolino (of Channel 4 Walter Presents fame) mentioned it as one to watch back at the end of last year at the live event in Birmingham Literary Festival in October. I might have been writing this blog for 18 months now, but I still have much to learn about what ‘coming soon’ means in the world of television. Soon wasn’t soon enough, and while constantly refreshing the Walter Presents schedule I was getting antsy. Surely lovely Walter wouldn’t fail me. The days and weeks ticked by and winter became spring. It wasn’t in any listings for shows coming soon until suddenly I saw an advert for it two weeks before the air date. Unfortunately for me, three weeks before the air date I’d bought it. In a dark moment of desperation I gave up on Walter and got the DVD. Lesson being, trust Walter and don’t worry. He’ll see you right.

Bull is a stylish American legal drama series that started this month in the UK on Fox.

The bull of the title is Dr Jason Bull, a charming and sparky expert psychologist, played by Michael Weatherly, a familiar face to NCIS fans (of which, inexplicably there seems to be legion). Taking on a new case every week, we follow Dr Bull and his team of fellow ‘trial science’ experts as they use a combination of data, technology and good old-fashioned human intuition to produce a terrifyingly accurate assumption of a jury’s verdict. Apparently “he knows a jury better than they know themselves”. Dr Bull isn’t an entirely fictional creation – the show has been developed by American chat-show host Dr Phil (credited as an executive producer) and inspired by his early career.

So we’re neatly and quickly set up for skillful experts bamboozling the bad guys with their cleverness and helping the little people. I’m not quite sure how the little people will find the money to work with them, but never mind. Don’t let reality get in the way of a good story!

After last year’s Agatha Christie adaptation And Then There Were None, hopes were set high for short story turned into two-part drama special Witness for the Prosecution, but this was quite a different beast. No mansions, no dinner guests being offed one-by-one, no detective twirling his enviable moustaches and not a normal Christie ending. Much interfering had been done, and there wasn’t much in the way of original Christie to be seen.

We’re transported to the roaring twenties and Kim Cattrall is Ms French, a wealthy widow living it up and having a fine time with her fancy man Leonard Vole much to the disgust of her loudly disapproving maid Janet. These days Emily French would be mocked as a cougar, a woman of a certain age who is attracted to younger men and has the nerve to go after them. These prejudices are certainly represented and Emily knows her actions make her unpopular and looked-down on in high society, but she doesn’t really care. Money is a pretty good insulator against what people think of you. Cattrall, famous for a strikingly similar character in Sex and the City, is essentially playing Samantha 70 years earlier.

Some seriousness to start your digest this once. Don’t fret – I won’t make a habit of it.

Amy Schumer is in a sort of rolling non-story of the week. She’s on her book launch publicity junket but this has been derailed by controversy surrounding Kurt Metzger, a writer on her Comedy Central show. This guy has a self-admitted history of violence against women and an “alarmingly vicious tendency to defend men accused of rape”. She sort of distanced him with a stock PR phrase, then she says he’s not working on her show Inside Amy Schumer any more, but he’s not fired – this is just because it’s on hiatus. Much confusion…

Jet was well fit. That is how I’m going to start my article – with a whole-hearted confession that yes, I did find her to be the best of all of the female Gladiators. I was probably too young to really understand what to do with my youthful hormones but I understood that Jet was young, attractive and ever so flexible. That was enough for me.

Jet: the object of many boys youthful hormones!

But I digress- it’s that time again where I delve into the annals of television history with very little protective gear and emerge with another artifact from television’s glorious past. It’s another nostalgia trip and, as you’ve probably worked out for my ever so subtle introduction, it’s the time for Gladiators to be put under the microscope. The show actually earned itself a reboot on Sky in the not too distant past.